This is a practical guide to proof of antiquity mining on RustChain: how to get a wallet, run the miner, pass hardware fingerprint attestation, and earn RTC. You do not need a GPU, an ASIC, or a fast computer. You need a real, physical machine — and the older it is, the more it earns. You can mine RTC on a PowerPC Mac from 2003, a retro x86 box, or the laptop you are reading this on.
Every miner needs an RTC wallet address to receive rewards. The simplest path is to pick a wallet identifier when you first run the miner — your rewards accrue to that ID on-chain. Desktop wallet builds with BIP39 seed phrases and Ed25519 signing are available from the RustChain repository on GitHub. Write down your seed phrase and keep it offline; it is the only way to restore a secure wallet.
Download the miner for your platform:
The miner supports --dry-run, --show-payload, and
--test-only flags so you can inspect exactly what it does and what it sends before
committing. First run asks for explicit consent. Don't trust — verify.
Instead of hashing, your machine proves what it is. The miner runs six hardware fingerprint checks — clock-skew and oscillator drift, cache-timing curves, SIMD-unit identity, thermal-drift entropy, instruction-path jitter, and anti-emulation checks — and submits the results to an attestation node. These measure physical properties of the silicon that software cannot forge. An attestation stays valid for 24 hours, so the miner simply re-attests on a loop. Machines that fail — virtual machines, emulators — are de-rewarded to roughly one-billionth of real-hardware rewards. The full mechanism is described on the Proof of Antiquity page.
Each epoch (~10 minutes per block, settled daily) distributes 1.5 RTC among all attested miners, one CPU one vote, weighted by hardware age:
So to mine RTC on vintage hardware is to hold the best seat in the network: a 2003 PowerBook G4 earns two and a half times the share of a brand-new server. Total supply is fixed at 8,388,608 RTC (223). See the full table and how the bonus decays over chain age on the antiquity multipliers page.
RustChain is a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) built on hardware preservation. Mining RTC keeps old machines out of landfills and gives them a verifiable on-chain identity and income. The power draw is whatever your machine idles at — there is no hash race to win, so there is nothing to gain by burning watts. If you already keep vintage computers running, proof of antiquity mining pays you for what you were doing anyway.